How to communicate your release plan

A release plan is simply the dates you expect to deliver on major milestones for your project.

The beauty of scrum and its sister methodologies is there isn’t too much ceremony around this information.

Really, once you get past trivial projects, you very quickly realize what is to be built is not very well understood. Any plan you come up with that ignores this fact is guaranteed to become a source of pain in the future.

I see planning as a search for value, if well done, it helps us answer the most important question for any software team. What should we build?

Its a consideration of the features, resources available and important dates. This then illuminates a possible path for development.

I find it ridiculous that some people write a detailed document complete with dates and then think they are done with it all and no further revisions are needed. A release plan should reflect the current context. This means the format you choose should be one that helps you best express your most current thoughts.

In this entry, I will be looking at some of the formats I have found useful for communicating release plans.

Outcome buckets

Well, as it turns out, planning your tasks as such is also really good for presentation. You can very easily get a sense of when you expect things to be completed.

Even better, the system communicates a level of uncertainty, because you don’t have an exact date for any of the tasks, you know it can be delivered on any date within the bucket and the plan would still be true.

For highly uncertain outcomes, you can increase the size of an individual bucket, say to 1 month. This communicates to all stakeholders there is much more risk to the outcome but we will get it done early if we can.

Spreadsheets

Maybe it’s my finance background talking, but I must say I love spreadsheets!

I find it to be one of the most powerful tools to establish coherence of thought within whatever your team is working on.

As part of our communication kit, spreadsheets allow us to play around with the quantitative bits of our plan. For example, if we need to model what would happen if a story point takes 5 days to develop as opposed to 3 days, it would be trivial to do so with the tool.

There is a perception in the business world anything on Excel is more serious than on a goofy tool like Trello. The perception is wrong but since its there, why not make use of it?

Gantt charts

A Gantt chart is a staple of the project management industry. They are highly visual and easy to understand. As you can tell from the fact am using a stock image here, I am not the biggest fan of them.

TeamGantt sample

The problem I have with Gantt charts is it doesn’t communicate the uncertainty inherent in any software project. Furthermore, when a date changes, you don’t immediately see how such a change escalates across all other tasks and further how the other outcomes are now more likely to take more time.

Not all of it is gloom and doom, because of its visual nature, its far easier for non-techies to grok it over say a spreadsheet.

Furthermore, for a high ceremony executive, a Gantt chat will likely fit better with the rest of the reports they have to go through for the rest of the day.

How do you communicate your own release plans? Talk to me in the comment section below or on my twitter @jchex